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I’ve seen a lot of projects fail when by all accounts, they shouldn’t have. The reason for this nearly every time, was that the requirements gathering stage of a project was done poorly, or sometimes not at all. Sometimes this is driven by budget or deadline constraints, and sometimes it’s because the people responsible are just unaware of how to go about gathering requirements in a structured manner, and if you’re one of those people, or know one of those people, then please read on.

A Value Proposition is a way to summarise what a client or project does. It can be used as a project’s mission statement, and can help focus the whole development and design team on important areas such as who the users are, the competitive advantages of their offering, and what the problem is that we’re trying to solve.

I would recommend creating one of these with your client in your first meeting with them, as it can be a valuable tool in requirements gathering, and beyond.

Web design is full of problems looking for solutions. Unfortunately too many designers (and clients) forget or ignore the problem they are trying to solve, and instead focus on just the aesthetics instead of looking at the bigger picture of what the site is trying to achieve. This should cause us to start asking ourselves what our role as “designer” is exactly.

“Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?”

Following in the footsteps of Khoi and Shaun Inman, here’s my introspective on 5 common elements that define my style

This is not a tutorial. This will not tell you how to fix the problems you encounter. This is a list of guidelines that will help you identify what the problem is, so that you can take the steps you need to fix it. This guide has to be relitively vague, as its not about one specific problem, its about every problem you’re ever likely to encounter.